Pattern Language for Good Old Future From Japanese Culture

TL;DR

This paper explores the cultural and architectural qualities of traditional Japanese environments, aiming to understand and promote the 'good old' qualities that foster comfort and support modern societal needs.

Contribution

It introduces a pattern language approach to capture and utilize traditional Japanese cultural elements for contemporary design and societal support.

Findings

Identifies key cultural patterns contributing to comfort.

Proposes a framework for integrating traditional qualities into modern contexts.

Highlights the importance of cultural understanding in design.

Abstract

Having developed greatly over millennium under its culture, the ancient buildings and old town atmospheres maintain a quality of comfort. However, people only appreciate the "good old" quality and do not think further about the rational reasons why they feel comfort in it. This keeps them from creating their own things and models with good old quality, relying on the imported western thinking and methods as a result of modernization. Since people are now struggling under the imbalanced and complex society, we believe that support is needed for generating things and frameworks with good old quality in modern time situations and scenes.